Braindisk

No post yesterday, a bit of a let-down: it was a private goal, not a public one, to try to post a little something here every day. However, to be fair, I do have a decent excuse.

I started this little project on a really terrible week to be taking on an extracurricular activity like my novel. Our play is in production this week and I’m spending more hours at the school than I could really ever advise any teacher to spend. This is affectionately known to theater-folk as “hell week”, and to non-theater-folk as “where the hell is my husband week.” Lots of hours and mental stress make it a terrible time to be taking on anything outside the norm as far as responsibilities go, so choosing to start my novel this week was, um, let’s not mince words, a bonehead move. Oh, I have this mountain to climb, why don’t I strap this big Goldfinger rock to my back. Rock-carrying is a thing I’ve always wanted to do.

Regardless, I’m clipping along just fine. Though I didn’t post, I did get my requisite writing done: 1600 words yesterday, and 1560 today. I was expressing to my dear wife yesterday how I really don’t want to get boasty or braggy about making my word counts because I know that I’m coasting merrily along in the honeymoon stage where undertaking this thing still seems like a pretty good idea. That will fade, and I am hoping that when they do I remember to have my dukes up so I can fight through it. That said, it’s hard not to feel heartened by the progress I’m making. I’ve got almost 7,000 words in the bag already, which, if we track our maths, is almost 10% of what I want to arrive at when all is said and done. Again, that’s inflated, and I do not expect to keep up that amount of flow throughout the process, but it’s not bad for 4 days’ work.

I even got a run in yesterday morning, which is always nice for making me feel productive. It rained on me a little bit, but that doesn’t bother me; in fact, at sixty degrees, a bit of rain on a run now and then is welcome. Non-runners hear that and think, running’s bad enough in the first place, why make it worse by doing it in the rain? Of course, many of us are simply broken individuals. The stuff that most folks would never consider is the stuff that keeps us going. It reminds me of Calvin’s dad:

I miss that comic so much.

I even, while I was running, had an idea for another project. It’s stupid. I once had the big bang explained to me thus: all the matter in the universe collected in a big round disk like a pancake, and at the moment of explosion the matter spun out sideways, bits of stars and planets and galaxies flying off and glomming together as the gravity of the central mass just wasn’t enough to contain them. In this metaphor my brain is the disk, spinning up to speed and throwing off all these ideas that I will never be able to recover or develop. Still, better too many ideas than too few.